A Stock Bubble of His Own – Part 3

midfr0st was enjoying a smoke on his balcony, far below him his neighbors were having a barbeque out in the grass. A world where he could sit out eating with neighbors seemed alien to him, his life had become a digital one. A pretty girl living in the same apartment complex was the only one he greeted if they passed each other. The rest he just avoided, trying to be noticed. This was of course difficult with him being 6’5″, his plan was instead not to make friends with anyone and hope no one would notice if he disappeared. midfr0st had a few exit plans but he wanted to remain himself and all the other plans meant he would have to change his identity.

In his vision he would reclaim the social life he once had, but at this stage it was too dangerous. For now he settled with opening a bottle of red wine and poured himself a glass.

The deadline was crawling closer, still five weeks off he was looking at Meriabeck’s web site. midfr0st had most of the current website memorized and it didn’t interest him anymore, instead he was looking for clues at the Internet Archive. Meriabeck had gotten a new website about a year ago, for the first month the footer had contained the text “Created by Quirith Design”.

Opening up a new tab in his browser midfr0st surfed to quirith.com, as he suspected they were web designers. midfr0st had a sip of his wine while waiting for the flash animations to load.

The company offered web sites starting from just low end static pages to more advanced sites using their own QuirithCMS. In midfr0st’s experience security was just an afterthought for web designers (among others). If they did think about it, it was in the lines of “Yeah sure, we’re using SSL 128 bit encryption!”

The reason why web designers developed their own CMS system was beyond midfr0st, the only reason he could think of was that they could charge their clients more money.

Moving on, midfr0st went to the websites for Quirith’s showcase customers. One of them had a nice little link in the bottom left corner titled “Admin”, the href for the link pointed to /QuirithCMSAdm/.

Opening up a new tab he typed in the url http://www.meriabeck.com/QuirithCMSAdm/. midfr0st was presented with a login form asking for username and password.

Not wanting to warn Meriabeck by tripping on any wires, midfr0st went back to the other customer’s page. He typed a single character in each field and pressed the login button.